Documentary Filmmaking

My passport says that I was born on 25 October 1931 in Babarpur, Ludhiana, and I believe it! Back then, births were not registered; to get their children to school early, parents often exaggerated their ages. My father, Sardar Tek Singh Dhillon, our Bau ji, was the first educated person of his village, so it’s quite possible he followed the trend. Means were limited, everything came from the farms, and so Bau ji and my mother, Sardarni Kartar Kaur, our Maa, could provide us with the basic necessities. We’d have only cottons to face the harsh winters and so jogged to school to keep ourselves warm. In fact, a four-foot wall divided our sleeping hall into two, one for the cattle and the other where we slept. The buffalo milk we drank straight out of the udder is still fresh in my memory. My grandmother never allowed Maa, a simple housewife, to do the household chores – after all, she had gifted her six grandsons and two granddaughters.

My younger brother, Joginder, and I would run after kites. Kite running gave him such agility and speed that later he was chosen to represent Kenya in Hockey at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.

Our destiny was to change when in 1918, Bau ji, at age 17, left home with some of his friends to work on the Uganda Railway in British East Africa. It would take him 29 years to reunite with all of us. Call it his foresight or sheer luck, we left India in April 1947, barely escaping the carnage of partition.

The journey to Kenya was one of firsts for me: a train journey, the thrills of a big city, Bombay, staying in a hotel and travelling on a ship, all for the first time. It was enchanting.

Bau ji had a diverse role with the Uganda Railways, including serving as station master at times. The home that he was allotted was modestly comfortable by Kenyan standards, but with running water, electricity and a toilet, it compared favourably with what we had been used to in India. Nevertheless, eight of us siblings and a set of parents still had to squeeze into two rooms, without any privacy.

In our Urdu-medium school back in India, teachers would punish us for every failure – poor grades, incomplete homework, being late, unruly behaviour and so on. It was different here; the focus was on good behaviour. However, for the lack of English knowledge, I, at age 16, was sent back to junior school, which discouraged me no end. Bau ji sensed it, and hired me a home tutor for English for the next three years, and I started enjoying sports in the meanwhile. Gurdev, my elder brother, worked in the Railways, Joginder became a doctor, and lo I was finding it tough to get a job, since I never completed school.

However, Dad gifted me a second-hand Box Brownie camera, which soon became my treasure! I clicked pictures at Hockey matches, processing them in small soap dishes from the kitchen. I then took a leap of faith and applied for an unrelated job through a classified ad. As soon as I entered the office, I knew I had lost the offer because the owner, Edith Haller, told me she wanted a qualified bookkeeper. However, she also owned a photographic business – Halle Studio. Whether it was my lop-sided turban, broken English or the passion in my voice, I don’t know, but I got a job. There’s been no looking back ever since. I bought out the studio from my employer in 1954. What happened next is a strange turn of events that inspired my vision to what I’d call my ‘illustrative’ career.

But it didn’t happen by fluke. In 1958, Bau ji shocked me with the news of my engagement, but it turned out to be made in heaven. Amarjeet ‘Ambi’ Kaur Sandhu and I took chances at what we really wanted for ourselves. Ambi was born and brought up in Kenya and had failed her O-levels! As a 1954 Kenya National Table Tennis Championship holder, I was elated to find that she too had played high school-level Table Tennis. Together, we aimed high at what we wished for. Straight after our marriage in 1958, she started to take over Halle Studio, clicking passport and ID pictures for British soldiers, many of whom were there to suppress the Mau Mau uprising.